The Internet's global and exponential growth is common knowledge today. The Internet is implemented using a large variety of connections between millions of computers. The recent developments on information navigation software and user interfaces, such as Mosaic of the World Wide Web, coupled with a continuously growing number of public access providers are making the Internet a fundamental component of the information age, if not the information super highway itself.
On the other hand, it is also well known that the current Internet lacks the 1) guaranteed quality of service (QOS), 2) security, and 3) an easy and flexible mechanism to charge for the information and transmission services which are all expected from a complete information network.
The existing telephone networks, on the other hand, have been offering these capabilities for a long time. In the future, Internet may also evolve to provide these functionalities. However, this requires fundamental changes in the global data communications infrastructure, e.g., Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM,) and this is not expected to happen for many years to come. What is desired is a practical way to provide guaranteed quality of service, security, and a charge mechanism for handling service requests made over the Internet.